Do you listen to yourself?
If you are a manager of sales professionals, you are charged with not only driving a certain amount of revenue, but you’re also charged with developing the abilities of the sales team. It’s a given. Our incentive is our own survival and the belief in leverage. We know we’ll be asked to bring in more revenue next year than we were asked to do this year—and most likely without additional headcount. The only way to do that is to have a more efficient and effective team, which is another way of saying I will continuously need more leverage or better productivity out of each of my team members. Continue reading “A simple way to improve your appointment setting performance.”
Many times we hear the old mantra that, “Once I get started making my daily appointment making calls, I’m okay. It’s getting started that is the challenge. I’ll do anything to keep from picking up that phone for the first call.”
Albert Einstein once said that the definition of insanity is “…doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.”
One of the most common objections I hear these days is that cold calling doesn’t work anymore. I’m here to tell you that it does work. We’ve trained over a thousand sales professionals to do it and they all report back that they set appointments.
I had a client the other day ask me how much research should be done prior to calling for that Initial Appointment. (Note that I’m not talking about the research one should do prior to going on the appointment itself.) He said they had been having a ‘spirited’ discussion within the sales force about it after the CEO got a call from an executive at a company who had been cold called by one of their sales people without any understanding of that CEO’s situation. Here are my rules of thumb.
Now that I’ve got your attention, let me lead with a caveat. Most voicemails and emails do not get returned these days. Ten years ago, we averaged 22% of our voicemails returned. I refer to that as the pre-voicemail era. Two years ago it was closer to a disappointing 3%, and now it’s back up to a more reasonable 10% including emails returned.